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Comment by jprete | Hacker News Reader

Apple was absolutely an industry leader before the 2000s. Which leaders exactly have been knocked off their perches?

Yahoo, Compuserve, AOL, Gateway Computers, Nokia, SEGA, Blockbuster, KMart, and countless more medium-large business that didn't have a strategy for the technology shift.

Yes, good list, and plenty of others too like Blackberry, Palm, Digg, MySpace, IBM, Blockbuster, etc etc

friendster, napster, yellow pages, arcades, Pontiac, Saturn, JNCO, geocities, iomega, Sun Microsystems, CREATIVE. So many bodies...

And DEC.

If Kmart is on the list, Sears obviously should be as well.

For sure, these are just a sample of companies that failed to maneuver the tech disruption or economic shifts.

DEC was a major tech and originator of a lot of very important tech, and they got gobbled up in the late 90s.

That's not the question was asked though. Sure, they were an industry leader in the 70s/80s but in the period 1990-2005? It's hard to claim they really were. It's one of the rare examples of a fallen giant getting back on their feet, most just slowly dissolve over a few decades. AT&T is the only other such example that comes to mind.

> AT&T is the only other such example that comes to mind.

If you're talking about the current AT&T, then I'd argue it's not a great example. The relationship between old AT&T and the company currently calling itself AT&T is tenuous. It would be more accurate to say the brand name survived, because it has good name recognition value.

Yahoo ("once the most popular web site in the U.S.", according to Wikipedia)?

Yahoo was more of a slow decline, and missed opportunities. They could have actually acquired Google and/or Facebook at one point, and could have been acquired by Microsoft at a later point.

The comment talks about "quickly changes the world around us rather fundamentally", "knocked off their perch", and "within a few years", which doesn't seem like an accurate description of what happened with Yahoo.

IBM, DEC, Sun MicroSystems, SGI.

From the phone era... Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola, Palm, Ericson...

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